How to move SAP and Customers Beyond CRM
After my SAP CRM State of the Nation and Light at the End of the Tunnel articles of earlier this year it is time again to have a look at what and how SAP is doing in the wider CRM arena. After all SAP also recently released its 1608 Hybris version, which in my eyes makes SAP very competitive again. Let’s start with some facts, which I’d like to put into a bigger context: SAP CRM 7.0 is in mainstream maintenance until end of 2025. This should give some relief to the existing customer base SAP CRM (the on premise product) continues to receive only little investment; on the positive side this investment is very customer driven At the same time CRM 7.0 is the only version that is not in customer specific maintenance; means it is the only version that still gets legal/regulatory and other updates SAP’s CRM strategy ‘Beyond CRM’ has a strong focus on the Hybris line of products, which, I think, meanwhile is highly competitive As an aside to the above points this situation makes the maintenance fee of 22 per cent for SAP CRM in combination with the suboptimal support appear very high The user interface of the Hybris line of products is a lot sleeker than the UI of CRM 7.0 From a functionality point of view, especially looking into industry specific functionalities, CRM 7.0 still has an edge over the Hybris portfolio, with the possible exceptions of Retail as an industry and Hybris Marketing. S/4HANA is getting pretty successful – this may be taken as conjecture, but people I trust confirm this;...
Is a Twitter acquisition pending? A Snap Analysis
Back in June most of us got surprised by the news that Microsoft has acquired LinkedIn. Neither of us deemed this a bad move from a company point of view. There ae just too many potential synergies between MS Dynamics CRM, Office365, Azure on one side and LinkedIn, as the leading business network on the other. At that time many of us, including myself, were musing about when Twitter will be acquired, and by who. #MSFT acquired #LinkedIn – Twitter now the last source of global personal #data. Is it up for grabs? Who would buy? #AAPL? #Google? — Thomas Wieberneit (@twieberneit) June 16, 2016 thinking of it – @SAP might find Twitter a good match, looking at their recent offerings #bigdata #AI #analytics https://t.co/sgUpcLgRBK — Thomas Wieberneit (@twieberneit) June 16, 2016 My initial guesses have been Apple or Google, then suggesting SAP to have a look into it. Thinking of it I could have added Oracle, IBM and Salesforce or media companies including telcos into the mix. In brief, a lot of companies should be interested in the treasure pit of data, behavioral data, that Twitter holds. Why? There are multiple reasons. Twitter is the last remaining independent social media outside Facebook and the big Chinese ones that the big western companies will not get access to; Tencent, Alibaba, Momo, etc. are rather buying it themselves than being for sale (to a western company), Facebook doesn’t need to. Twitter has a profitability and growth challenge, but an interesting technology and, importantly, is a great source of real time information about a lot of topics, from business to consumer....
Intelligent Home Automation – Smart, isn’t it?
Amazon’s Alexa will now talk to GE’s connected appliances in a smart home push is the headline on techrepublic that got me thinking today. Home automation is definitely on the rise again. Wow, that’s cool, being able to manage my home without any remotes, which my kids tend to lose somewhere, anyways. Thinking of the kids: How about the ability to have an override on their TV usage … Home Automation is the Future Home automation or smart homes are on the list of hot topics for quite a while. The intelligent fridge that automatically orders food items that are about to run out is a decades old story. Its first mention was about 1998. Even my 12-year-old house here in NZ is fully wired and has some (not so, admittedly – but pretty expensive if you need to repair them) smart controllers which probably could control more than they effectively do. Technology like this is not only exciting but offers quite some potential to make our lives far simpler and to improve the experience of using the connected devices, well, with that of living in our homes. Still, many attempts at smart homes have been done over the years, most have failed or were not that successful. Comes the cloud and massive improvements in computing power. Comes the mobile phone and the tablet. Comes working voice recognition. Comes predictive analytics, artificial intelligence and machine learning. Well, AI is around since at least the mid 60s; Weizenbaum’s famous Eliza dates back to 1966. Alan Turing developed his famous test in 1950. AI was again a hip topic in the...